Killer in the Walls: The Crimes of Daniel LaPlante

Morbid

This episode of Morbid explores the disturbing case of Daniel LaPlante, a teenage boy who became obsessed with Tina Bowen after a brief phone relationship. After their awkward first date, LaPlante began

Key takeaways

The case highlights how obsession can escalate into extreme violence and invasion of privacy, even when the perpetrator is young.

Main topics

Stalking and obsession
Domestic terror and invasion of privacy

Notable quotes

"Your home is your safe space. And for that to be... violated in that way."

Conclusion

The case of Daniel LaPlante serves as a chilling reminder of how deeply psychological terror can affect victims,

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hey weirdos, I'm Elena. I'm Ash. And this is Morbid in the Burr Months. Happy September! I knew what to sing this time. Last time I didn't. I feel alive. Oh yeah. I feel powerful. I feel like we put practical magic on in the studio today and just had it play. And it was gorgeous. Well, we did our shit. It's 70 degrees. Barely. It's raining. It's gloomy. We got yummy drinks this morning. We had good breakfast. We saw a dog. I yelled at that dog that I loved it and that I hope it had a great fucking day. It's true. Speaker 1 (1:02) And I'm having a great day. And we got cake because it's Caleb's birthday. It is Caleb's birthday. Caleb of Horror Soup and Scream fame. Hell yeah. If you see him in the streets. Say happy birthday, bitch. Belated happy birthday because his birthday is today. You missed it. Yeah. So say hope your birthday was great. Hope your birthday was swell, big fella. Yeah. So we're going to eat cake with him when we record Scream later. Not marble cake because it came to my attention today that the two. Speaker 1 (1:27) Other people in this office don't like marble cake. No, I hate marble cake. I ordered a cake and I was like, you guys like marble, right? And they both, Aiden and Elena were like, what? Yeah. And I thought they were fucking with me. No. Where do you guys stand on marble cake? Let us know. I just have never liked it. I don't get it. I think you get the best of both worlds. See, I don't. Here's my thing. Whole ass one thing. Don't half ass two. See, I don't even feel like it's half-assing. Marble cake is fully half-assing both flavors. No, I think it's so yummy. You're never getting a full bite of one flavor. And if you are, it's usually shitty of that flavor, to be quite honest. I've never had a marble cake where I was like, wow, this is good cake. Like, it's just like, no, this is shitty. Speaker 1 (2:13) Please let us know where you stand. Yeah, I just don't like it. I fear just from this room today that I'm in the minority. No, I think you might be in the majority. I think it's fairly beloved, but I don't know. I've never made a marble cake. I just assume most of my views are in the strange category, so I just could be wrong. A lot of them are. I think a full chocolate cake is where it's at or a full vanilla cake. I mean, I'm down for both of those too. Make it like. Speaker 1 (2:38) Put your whole 10 toes down into that flavor. Here's the thing about my thick ass. Cake is cake. And I like all cake. I like velvet cake. I like cookies and cream cake. I like marble. I could name you a bunch of cakes. See, I'm picky with cakes. Lemon cake. Oh, honey. Make sure you're doing the cake right for me. Good to know. I'll never make you a marble cake on your birthday. Well. What would you do? I would eat it and thank you for it because you put time and effort into it. Wow. Yeah. Speaker 1 (3:07) But now I know. So that would be such a dick move. That was like a happy birthday. Here's your bubble cake. So yeah. Yay for the Burr months. And cake. Already decorating for Halloween. I'm already ready for it. I'm going to rewatch Widow's Bay. That's my next thing. I told Drew today that if he didn't get my Halloween decorations out of storage, that I would fight him to the death when I got home from work. And he said, clearly you haven't been looking at the doorbell cameras. And there they were. And I said, oh, my God. Speaker 1 (3:38) I'm so excited to decorate. Yeah, I feel good. I feel alive. Yeah. My seasonal depression is leaving. Slowly but surely. Because I have reverse seasonal depression. Yep. So I feel good. It's valid. I feel good today. I feel powerful. I did something really weird and powerful earlier that I didn't even mean to. I wish we could talk about it. Yeah, it's crazy. But it was the weirdest thing I've ever experienced in my life. But it shows you that I come into my true power in the fall. Even Aiden was like, what? But yeah, it's fall. But today on this, the first day of the Bird Month. On this Bird Day. We're going to be doing the crimes of Daniel LaPlante. Now you may be like, wait a minute. This sounds a little familiar. We did a mini morbid. Yeah, it was one of my first mini morbids. Way back. It had to have been like 2018. Speaker 1 (4:33) 2019 maybe. I think I got a solid five pages put together. Yeah, like it was a mini-morbid. Yeah. So we didn't really get into like the, you know, the nitty gritty. And it's been a long time. It's kind of gotten buried in the archives. So we wanted to do like another look at this case because this case is a crazy case. It is fucked up. So this will have a little bit more of the details that a mini-morbid normally wouldn't have. And it's a crazy one. It's also a Massachusetts case, which is... It is? Yeah. I forgot that. Yeah. Fuck. This is Massachusetts. Oh, shit. Which is kind of gross. What? How many? That's like, that's almost 10 years ago that we covered that. That's nuts. So, and again, like we just didn't go deep into it. No. So we went deep into it this time in Holy Hell. Fun. So let's get into it, shall we? Let's. So this goes back to early 1986. Speaker 1 (5:28) Frank Bowen's wife lost, unfortunately, her long battle with cancer. So he was left alone to raise their two teenage daughters, Tina and Karen. This was at their home in Pepperell, Massachusetts. Pepperell. That's a small town near the New Hampshire border, for those who don't know. As the sole income now for the family, Frank took whatever shifts he could with the bus company he worked for. He just worked his ass off to make sure the kids had everything they needed. Speaker 1 (5:56) But he often had to work at night, which left the girls home alone in the house. Yeah. Again, they're teenagers. It's not like he was leaving children. It's also the 80s. So Tina, one afternoon, got a call from a boy who said his name was Danny LaPlante. Yeah. Danny told Tina he actually went to a different high school than her, but he had gone to her high school. Or I think it was like he had gotten her phone number because a friend of his had gone to her high school. Oh, okay. And thought that they would. Speaker 1 (6:24) Maybe hit it off. Weird. This is the 80s. Oh, okay. Fair. This is the only way of communicating. If you want to get in touch with someone or you want to start anything, you have to call. I literally just said earlier, like maybe two minutes ago, this is the 80s. And then you're like, this is the 80s. And I'm like, oh, right, right. Now, over the phone, Tina said that Danny seemed charming. He seemed nice, like someone you would want to get to know. And why not? All right. Speaker 1 (6:51) So almost immediately, the two started talking daily. And, you know, they were like really hitting it off. Cute. And for Tina, the relationship with Danny was her first. And she was just really excited about it. Now, after a few weeks of daily phone calls, Danny finally mustered up the courage to ask Tina on a date. And the two made plans to meet at a local ice cream shop, which should be like a very adorable date. Yeah, date one. Love it. And Tina couldn't wait to finally meet Danny in person. And he had also said, He had claimed that he was like a football player and super popular and like he's kind of like the dream guy for like a teen. You know what I mean? But so she gets to the ice cream shop and the image of Danny that she had built in her head was different. Shattered, I would say. Okay. Rather than a handsome football player. Speaker 1 (7:43) who was like outgoing and excited to meet her. Danny was very disheveled and unkempt. He did not look like a football player, you know, and he just wasn't the same in person. And she was like, oh, this is not the same. So she, you know, she kind of felt like she had been lied to because she had. Yes. He had led her to believe certain things about himself. Yeah, we've all seen catfish. Again, catfish. He pulled an Angela. So she was disappointed, and frankly, she was uncomfortable. Yeah. This guy has lied to you. You don't want to start anything off on a lie. And now you feel weird about it. Like, that's weird. So after an hour or so, she was like, I'm pretty good with going home now. Like, she was just like, all right, I don't want to do this anymore. Thanks, but no thanks. Which is 100% her right. Absolutely it is. If you are not into someone on a first date. Speaker 1 (8:32) You can end that date five seconds into the date. It doesn't fucking matter when. It's called free will. Exactly. Now, for a few weeks, Dani had been, you know, a pleasant distraction from the pain of her mother's recent death. It kind of brought her into something a little exciting and something she could actually be happy about. But after that really awkward afternoon date, she didn't see Dani again. And she was just like kind of thrown back into dealing with the grief of losing her mother. Speaker 1 (8:59) Now, one afternoon, a few weeks after that disastrous date with Danny, Tina and Karen decided, you know what? We want to try to talk to our mom. So they held a seance. They did like a little like Ouija board kind of situation. They wanted to just talk to their mom. Teenage girls who just lost her, I would do the same thing. So down in the basement, they set up candles. They did like the whole thing. And they were just trying to talk to their mother spirit. Speaker 1 (9:25) And they were like, you know what, this was kind of unsuccessful. Nothing really happened. But almost immediately after the seance, strange things started happening in the Bowen household. One night while Tina and Karen were watching TV, they heard loud knocking. That sounded like it was coming from the front of the house. So assuming someone was knocking at the front door, Tina went to see who was there, but no one was there. Now the next night, the noises continued and it occurred to Tina and Karen that the seance Speaker 1 (9:53) Maybe it was successful. Maybe this is what this is. And they were like, wow, like maybe this is some form of communication, which literally shatters my heart. Yeah, that breaks my heart into tiny little pieces. Because it wasn't just knocking. There were other inexplicable things happening in the house. Like the lights would go on and off without anyone touching the switches. Objects would be moved or like misplaced completely. The TV channels would change, like sometimes seemingly on their own. reporter Jeffrey Higgins said the two girls believed they'd contacted their mother. Yeah. They thought their mother's ghost was doing these things to somehow communicate with them. Oh. Now, Tina and Karen may have believed they'd successfully made contact with their mother, but it didn't make them feel better because it didn't feel like their mom. Yeah. Speaker 1 (10:41) So maybe they were like, oh, no, like we've made contact with something, but it's not mom. They were worried, yeah, because then the knocking on the walls and other forms of communication seemingly or things happening, they said it felt often aggressive and like vaguely threatening. Yeah. Which was not their mom's energy. They also started to sense that whatever was communicating them was somehow also watching them. Ew. And again, if this was their mother's ghost, it didn't make sense that she would take food and drinks from the refrigerator. No. Which. Would happen. Oh. When no one was home, there would be food or drinks gone from the refrigerator. This would fuck me up on a level that I can't even explain out loud. Yeah. After more than a month of noises and missing objects. A month? Mm-hmm. Speaker 1 (11:24) They decided to tell their dad what was going on. And after hearing the story, Frank, you know, like kind of broke his heart. He assumed the girls were just still really wrestling with the grief of losing their mother. And they were like, he was like, I think this is just them really wanting to hear this or experience this. Or maybe it's just like it's an old house. It's probably just noises. Higgins said, the reporter said, their father, Frank, never heard any of the taps, but he was working a lot. Speaker 1 (11:50) He just thought these were two teenage girls reaching out desperately and trying to contact their mother, and their imaginations were getting the best of them, which is a reasonable thing to think. Yeah, absolutely. The noises and other inexplicable experiences continued, though, for several weeks. They would get louder. They were getting more aggressive with each time they would happen. And in time, the girls started to think, okay, I don't think this is our mom at all. And I don't even know what this is, but we got to do something about that. Speaker 1 (12:17) And that was confirmed one night in the fall of 1986. It was just a typical evening at their house, and Frank was at work, Tina and Karen were home, they were watching TV, and they heard the familiar knocking. And this time, though, it didn't sound like it was coming from the walls, but from the basement. Ew. Determined to figure this out, Tina grabbed a flashlight, which also, what a fucking badass. With Karen right behind her, they descended into the dark basement. And at first, it looked like nothing was different in there. But as Tina swept the flashlight across the room, she saw it. On the wall, across from the stairs, written what looked to be blood, was a message. It said, I'm in your room. Come find me. Ew! Yeah. Oh, I just got chills. As someone who has been a teenage girl before, Speaker 1 (13:11) That is the shit that is nightmares are made of. You can't even conceive of that. No. Being home alone without your dad in the house as a teenage girl. I'm just speaking from my own experience. Yeah. Hearing noises in the basement and then going down there and seeing written in what looks to be blood. I'm in your room. Come find me. That's a horror movie. That's an urban legend. That's not even. What? That is the movie urban legend. So obviously. Speaker 1 (13:40) Fucking terrified. The girls did exactly what they should.